I eat whole grains, tons of raw fruit and vegetables, dairy products sparingly, red meat once or twice a week, and no saturated fats. I have a picture-perfect diet, except for the cream in my coffee.
Something tells me that putting skim milk in my coffee isn't going to solve this problem.
6 comments:
O, I have the same problem. Hell, when I went veggie in grad school, my cholesterol was STILL in the high 200's.
I've resigned myself to a coronary.
1. Your serum cholesterol is determined by about 25% diet and exercise, 75% genetics. I suspect doctors are coy about admitting this because they don't want their patients to give up on the 25% part.
2. The media and the food pyramid have lied to you. Your levels of dietary fat, including saturated, have almost nothing to do with your cholesterol or risk of heart disease.
Sometimes I think the only reason the whole "fat bad!" thing has persisted as long as it has even though people started poking holes in it more than fifteen years ago is that the same word is used for lipids and obesity...
LDLs at that level are genetic. You can diet all you want but nothing will work except meds. The good news is at least you don't have a very low HDL.
I have a patient I've been seeing for many years whose pre-statin LDL was in the mid-200's. At first all I had to offer was cholestyramine. You try eating a little package of sand sprinkled on your food four times a day. Her LDL the other day on Crestor 40 mg was 133. Trust me: statins are your friends.
Consider the hypothesis that cholesterol levels are determined by insulin levels, which are determined by carbohydrate intake. There might be things you could adjust to improve your levels, so that we can keep reading your blog for a long time. For example, consider Gary Taube's book Good Calories Bad Calories. Good luck....
Three words:
Red. Yeast. Rice.
Thorne makes a good one, Choleast.
Prescriptives will kill you.
I would like to introduce you to a blog call Junk food Science. This blog is run by a nurse who is an RN with an M.S.N.
She studies and comments on all the medical studies that are done concerning diet weight and health. Her comments are revealing and interesting. She is especially hard on the chronic misreporting by the press.
You will learn the following in the blog, diet has almost no effect on cholesterol, cholesterol levels are not a predictor of heart disease and that mildly elevated cholesterol levels are protective as you age.
Here is the link
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/
Read the installment called "Mllkshake Friday:More important things."
Go eat something you really like and ENJOY IT.
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